The CrossFit
SAT-Prep Program
E.M. Burton
E.M. Burton
CrossFit Founder and CEO Greg Glassman describes a pilot program that combines
CrossFit training with education—a perfect fit with CrossFit’s mission to change lives.
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CROSSFIT JOURNAL • OCTOBER 2012
C
rossFit has been in the business of
improving athletic proficiency for a
long time.
We’ve got a physiological answer
to the question of fitness, and it’s
constantly varied functional movement
performed at high intensity. But in net
what we do is we make people better,
and that’s the more important part.
Curiously, “better” is really fuzzy
language—but you get to decide for
yourself and measure for yourself what
“better” is.
If you would come into my box on
Day 1, I’d tell you to go off in a corner
and write down five things that would
make you a better human being. Forget
CrossFit. Just write down five things that
you wish were true of you. Make them
subjective or objective, something you
can measure or not, and then put the list
away. I’d want you to work out with us
three to five times a week for six months,
and we’d then review that list and see if
we’re closer or further from the target. I
already know what the answer would be.
If better involves academic success,
getting into the right schools, and getting
the right job—and that is indeed a definition of “better” for many—I think in our
gyms we can improve cognitive function
by just about any standard or accepted
measure. We can do it with children, and
Greg Glassman
as told to Mike Warkentin
we’re going to start by improving SAT
scores. We can make kids smarter and
improve their thinking processes, logic,
vocabularies. We’ll give them better
tools to process and understand. The
CrossFit SAT-prep program is going to do
all this.
For long periods of time, I tutored
training clients and some of their kids
to tremendous net effect. I also learned
early that the emotional and character
components that led to significant training effect—success in athletes, success in
training—were also carried over perfectly
to academic success. It was after finding
success with gymnastics, for instance,
that I found success with mathematics.
Not the other way around.
Mind-body dualism is a myth. I
don’t want to train like there’s some
sharp division between what happens
from the collarbones up and the rest of
the body. Brain function is part of the
body. I’ve long thought that our training
was a metaphor for boatloads of life
lessons and patterns for success. It’s
time to tie all of that together with the
SAT-prep project.
CrossFit has a number of gyms that
are currently playing with the SAT-prep
concept with between three and 25 kids
or so, and we’re already seeing some
data. It’s just what you would think.
SAT-PREP
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Michael Doyle
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CROSSFIT JOURNAL • OCTOBER 2012
Above-the-Neck Fitness
By Hilary Achauer
“I hate math. I’m horrible at it.”
Kelsey, a tall, 16-year-old highschool girl from Murietta, Calif., had
made up her mind about math.
When her friend Morgan told her
about a 12-week program that combined CrossFit instruction with SAT-prep
classes, Kelsey figured she didn’t have
anything to lose. She needed help with
the math portion of the SAT, and the
course was free. Morgan’s mom worked
out at CrossFit by Overload, the box
offering the class. Other than cheerleading, Kelsey didn’t have a particularly
athletic background, but Morgan told
her she’d have fun.
This is how Kelsey, Morgan and five
other high-school girls found themselves
at CrossFit by Overload’s 6 p.m. class,
nervously facing a warehouse full of
barbells, rings, pull-up bars and other
unfamiliar equipment.
“When they started, they didn’t want
to get uncomfortable,” said Paula Gravatt,
one of the owners of CrossFit by Overload
and the person in charge of the program.
“In the beginning, all they wanted to
do was sit-ups,” said Dustin Marshman,
who taught both the CrossFit and SAT
portions of the program. “They had no
experience with a barbell, and none of
them could do even one pull-up.”
It’s important to be
physically strong, but
equally important is
what Coach Glassman
likes to call “above-theneck fitness.”
The SAT-prep program, the brainchild of CrossFit founder and CEO Greg
Glassman, combined SAT courses with
CrossFit. The program consisted of three
days of CrossFit training and two days
of SAT tutoring, with CrossFit Endurance
homework on the weekend. The classes
Michael Doyle
erything I could to improve the cognitive
processes of my friends.
And we’d have fun with it, too.
I’ve got these gyms that sit empty
at least for a good portion of the night
and a good chunk of the weekend. The
whiteboards are already there, and we
need 20 $5 plastic stacking chairs. And
I need an instructor, someone to raise
a hand and say, “I’m a teacher.” And
suddenly all of us are in a completely
different place.
In Kenya, we’re building schools
and bringing fresh water, and I don’t
think it’s lost on anyone that there will
eventually be gyms at each of these
schools. On that side of the world,
we’ve got schools that are going to
become gyms, and on the other side of
the world we’ve got gyms that are going
to become schools.
You know the old adage about
teaching someone to fish rather than
feeding him? This is clearly a case of
teaching someone how to fish. I don’t
think there’s any member of our community more deserving of a helping
hand than these student athletes.
And we’re going to help them.
Michael Doyle
E.M. Burton
Every SAT tutor knows you can improve
SAT scores. Guess what? We are. To
see if this becomes something that the
affiliate can fuse into his culture or her
culture, and the box’s culture, is the
remaining question, and I don’t see how
you can miss.
The affiliate now has a wonderful
opportunity. What a great thing it is to be
able to tell a parent, “I’m going to take
care of your kid’s physical and mental
fitness. Ask me how.” That’s a sign to
put on the wall.
It used to be the most important
thing I could do was unlock the door
in the morning and stand there with
somebody and teach him how to squat.
We are in a position now to serve those
affiliates that are unlocking the door
every morning, and they don’t need me
standing over their shoulder giving them
pointers on squatting. But if I could go
back to that original little CrossFit gym
in Santa Cruz and unlock the door, I’ll
tell you right now what I would do next:
I would take those chairs we were using for seminars and I’d hold SAT-prep
classes. I’d teach math to people who
are afraid of math, and I’d be doing ev-
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4
were free to the students, and their attendance was entirely voluntary.
So what does CrossFit have to do
with SAT scores? How were deadlifts
and push-ups going to help Kelsey get
better at math?
The answer is complicated and
goes back to one of Glassman’s goals
for CrossFit. It’s important to be physically strong, but equally important is
what Glassman likes to call “above-theneck fitness.”
Fitness and the Brain
CrossFit is not the first to explore
the connection between exercise and
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CROSSFIT JOURNAL • OCTOBER 2012
the brain. Others have already done so,
and the connection appears to be real.
In their 2008 book Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and
the Brain, John J. Ratey and Eric Hagerman report on a school in Naperville, Ill.,
where a revolutionary new P.E. program
resulted in Naperville students finishing
first in the world in science in the international standards test called Trends in
International Math and Science Study
(TIMSS). That’s ahead of Singapore,
Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Japan.
The authors write about a FitnessGram
test in 2001 that found fit kids scored
twice as well on academic tests as
their unfit peers. And one school that
increased P.E. from one class a week to
45 minutes a day saw violent incidents
decrease from 228 to 95 for the year.
Coach Glassman
believes that CrossFit
not only brings improved
fitness but also creates
improved people.
How Marshman found himself
in a CrossFit box standing in front of
seven 15-year-old girls is another story.
This father of two who works as a civil
engineer is a former Navy SEAL who
also runs an OSHA safety school and
is a trainer at CrossFit by Overload.
When asked how he ended up teaching
the SAT course, he laughed and said,
“Paula tricked me!”
One night, after a CrossFit class,
Marshman saw a parent struggling to
help his child with his junior-high math
homework. Marshman stepped in to help,
someone snapped a picture, and before
Marshman knew it, he had six days to
prepare the 12-week SAT-prep program.
Michael Doyle
E.M. Burton
Tricked Into Teaching
Marshman used Kaplan SAT 2012:
Strategies, Practice, and Review and
The Princeton Review’s Cracking the SAT
2012 as references and came up with a
plan. Marshman and the other instructors gave the students a CrossFit test
and a sample SAT test at the beginning
of the program. The CrossFit test consisted of a 1RM deadlift and then a timed
workout that included a 400-meter run,
40 air squats, 30 sit-ups, 20 push-ups
and 10 pull-ups (the students used
either a green or blue band depending
on their strength).
If teaching 15- and 16-year-old girls
CrossFit was a challenge, trying to get
them to pay attention to algebra at 7 p.m.
on a Thursday was almost impossible.
“Teenage girls always have somewhere else to be,” Marshman said with
a laugh. “My tactic was to run this like
a college class and give them respect. I
did get respect from them, but I had to
engage them constantly.”
Marshman noticed that Kelsey, the
girl who struggled with math, would have
to look at a friend’s paper in order to figure
out how to even start the math problem.
“I told her, ‘Just start doing math,’”
Marshman said. “‘It will lead you somewhere. Maybe you don’t go down the
right path when you start, but somewhere along the way it will lead you to
the right trail.’”
That’s a little like CrossFit. Fran
doesn’t do itself. You just have to pick up
the barbell and start doing thrusters.
Meanwhile in New Jersey
At the same time Marshman and
Gravatt were running their program in
California, Karianne Dickson was running a similar experiment out of Guerrilla
Fitness in Morristown, N.J. Just like the
Overload project, Glassman had asked
Dickson to hold a free 12-week program
that combined CrossFit instruction with
SAT prep.
Dickson was able to find tutors—
a husband-and-wife team—who run
a private SAT-tutoring business. The
class included six kids and consisted of
semiweekly sessions that combined an
hour of CrossFit instruction with an hour
of SAT prep. The kids who participated
were all somehow connected with CrossFit—either their parents were members
or they were friends with someone who
was a member.
Dickson and her team tried to reach
out to the public schools to cast a wider
net with this free program, but their
proposal met with suspicion.
“The impression we got was that
the superintendent thought this was
too good to be true,” Dickson said. “We
weren’t a known name, like (test-prep
company) Kaplan, so they didn’t want to
take a risk and send students to us. Our
hope is that with this pilot program we
can go back and show the kids’ progress
and reach out to the community.”
“I have been able to learn
more in a few months’
time than I think I would
have been able to without
the CrossFit component.”
—Gabrielle
Michael Doyle
Glassman believes that CrossFit not
only brings improved fitness but also creates improved people who are fit, smart,
and operate with leadership and integrity. CrossFit is not just a fitness program
but a lifestyle program, and his goal is
to improve people’s lives in a variety of
ways. Glassman chose to focus on an
SAT program because a good SAT score
can be the difference between getting a
scholarship and facing years of studentloan debt. It can be the difference between a satisfying, high-paying position
or a go-nowhere, minimum-wage job.
As Ratey and Hagerman wrote in
Spark, “Exercise provides an unparalleled stimulus, creating an environment
in which the brain is ready, willing and
able.” The administrators in Naperville
were so impressed by the effect of
exercise on academics that “guidance
counselors (began) suggesting that all
students schedule their hardest subjects
immediately after gym, to capitalize on
the beneficial effects of exercise.”
SAT-PREP
6
“People involved in CrossFit talk a
lot about our community involvement,
but here the members were seeing it
firsthand. They weren’t surprised to see
us reaching out,” Dickson said. “They feel
that this is part of what CrossFit is about.”
The adults were also impressed by
the dedication of these young students,
especially because most adults are happy
to be finished with studying for the SATs.
“I heard a lot of them say, ‘Taking
an SAT course is the last thing I would
want to do after a WOD!’” Dickson said
with a laugh.
“The SAT program has worked in
great tandem with the (CrossFit) classes,”
said Gabrielle, a student who participated
in the Guerilla Fitness program. “Postworkout, with high endorphin levels, I have
been able to learn more in a few months’
time than I think I would have been able
to without the CrossFit component. The
mental toughness developed in the gym
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CROSSFIT JOURNAL • OCTOBER 2012
has played a vital role in my improved SAT
scores, allowing me to push longer and
harder through the grueling test.”
The high-school students are not
the only ones who benefitted from this
program. The adult members would
walk into the gym after one of the SAT
classes, and instead of WODs and PRs,
they’d see math formulas on the board.
You Can Do It, Mom!
I visited CrossFit by Overload after
the SAT program ended to meet with
Marshman and Gravatt and interview
Michael Doyle
Marshman carefully tracked his students’ progress with both CrossFit and
the SAT. For the SAT, which he tested
three times over the 12-week course,
Marshman saw a linear increase in the
class average in the math section of the
test. The students’ scores increased by
37.9 percent overall. The overall increase in the critical reading portion of
the SAT was 21.4 percent.
On the CrossFit side of things,
the average deadlift increased by 24
percent, while the average result of the
timed workout was 23.9 percent faster.
In his written summary of the course,
Marshman wrote, “All of the students
increased their power output during
the baseline test. All but one student
increased their deadlift scores.”
Over on the other side of the country,
the students at Guerilla Fitness did Helen
and Jackie at the beginning and end of
the program, as well as the CrossFit Total.
Gabrielle improved her CrossFit Total
from 265 to 390, adding 60 lb. to her
back squat. She improved her Helen time
by more than 2 minutes and switched
from a green band to a blue band for her
pull-ups. On Jackie, Gabrielle shaved 50
seconds off her time.
The New Jersey group improved
their average math scores by 100 to 150
points, and their critical reading scores
increased by 190 points. What’s more,
the SAT tutors noted that all the students quickened their pace in the critical
reading and writing sections, which will
help them when they take the SAT in a
pressure-filled real-world setting.
E.M. Burton
E.M. Burton
The Results
SAT-PREP
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E.M. Burton
of outreach and see how CrossFit can affect every aspect of life, the wheels start
turning. How else can CrossFit change
lives? What else can they do to improve
their community? These are the types of
questions Glassman is hoping people will
start asking themselves.
CrossFit then becomes something
more. It’s not just, “How can I get a PR
in my clean and jerk?” but “How can
I make my community, my part of the
world, a better place?”
“CrossFit was the
glue that connected
teens with potentially
higher SAT scores.”
“It seemed insignificant to me at the
time, but in retrospect, CrossFit was the
glue that connected teens with potentially higher SAT scores,” Marshman said.
He continued: “We can’t prove from
our data that CrossFit increases learning
ability; however, we can say that without
CrossFit the students would have never
completed the course. Their love of CrossFit helped them stick with the program.
“Parents bribe their kids with everything from money to candy to video
games to get them to study hard. We
offered a healthy alternative, and they
took the bait.”
And even if the children would
rather deadlift than study at times, it’s
certain they’ll appreciate the program all
the more when they’re receiving acceptance letters from all the right schools.
i
For more info on CrossFit’s SATprep program, contact Laura Bradrick at
[email protected] or 1-605-888-0934.
E.M. Burton
—Dustin Marshman
Toward the end of the course,
Marshman, the teacher of the California
group, asked the girls what they thought
of the program. The SAT portion helped
their SAT scores and their grades, but
they were most enthusiastic about the
CrossFit workouts.
“They told me they loved the CrossFit part. They said they are at school all
day,” Marshman said. “They are tired of
studying. The reason they kept coming
was to work out.”
He continued: “One of the best
parts of the program was watching the
students hit a point where they realized
CrossFit was for them. The biggest thing
I saw CrossFit do for the students was
trigger their competitive nature. They
would compete against each other in a
WOD, and then they took that fire and
brought it with them into class. They
were easily taught on those days.”
Gravatt also saw an unexpected
benefit of the SAT course.
“This course impacted things they
didn’t think about,” she said. “It improved
their regular test taking at school.”
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CROSSFIT JOURNAL • OCTOBER 2012
“None of us did well on the PSAT
(Preliminary SAT),” Morgan said. “In this
class, we improved our lifting form, got
in shape and learned at the same time.”
“I loved working together with my
teammates during the WOD,” Kelsey
said. “I learned new (test-taking) strategies. Overall, this was a good experience. I would recommend it to anyone.”
She continued: “The SAT tutoring
helped with my other classes. Dustin
tutored us in Algebra 2.”
Just then, Marshman showed up. He
greeted the girls and asked Kelsey how
she did on her algebra test. Kelsey got a
huge smile on her face and said proudly,
“I got a B!”
Marshman beamed and gave her a
high five. “That’s great!” he said.
In a warehouse filled with pull-up
bars and barbells, Kelsey found someone who made math less intimidating,
who made it seem possible. This same
girl increased her deadlift weight by 48
percent and improved her time for the
run/sit-ups/push-ups/pull-ups workout
by 23 percent.
That sounds a lot like Coach Glassman’s definition of fitness above and
below the neck.
A CrossFit Bribe
Dickson told me that a course like
this has a ripple effect beyond the impact on the high-school students. Once
members of a CrossFit gym see this kind
Michael Doyle
In a warehouse filled
with pull-up bars and
barbells, Kelsey found
someone who made math
less intimidating, who
made it seem possible.
E.M. Burton
two of the students who participated in
the program. I talked with Gravatt while I
watched Kelsey and Morgan go through
a workout. Morgan was there with her
mom, Maria, and they stood with their
arms around each other before the
workout. Mother and daughter suffered
through the Hero WOD Brenton, a tough
combination of bear crawls, standing
broad jumps and burpees.
When Maria faltered toward the end,
Morgan yelled out, “C’mon, mom, you
can do it!”
After they had a chance to catch
their breath, I chatted with Kelsey and
Morgan about their experience in the
SAT-prep program.
“We were welcomed by everybody
on the first day,” Kelsey said. “We got
constant encouragement. And we learned
new strategies in the SAT class, like how to
break the test up into chunks and look for
key words. And if we gave a wrong answer,
Dustin would make us do burpees!”
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